SN Systems are the Sony group who fashion the tools developers use to create their games for Sony’s consoles – and after the initial issues studios had getting their heads around developing for the PlayStation 3, they’ve “thought about how developers pick it up and how they get started” when creating the Vita equivalent.
Accessibility and ease-of-use were, SN Systems Director Andy Beveridge admitted, “not something we’re really known for, because we have a habit of targeting the power users.”
“We love the technology, so confronted with something like PS3, the first thing we think is ‘how are we going to support debugging all of those SPUs, and how are developers going to use them?’.”
This however led them to take the wrong approach with the PlayStation 3 tools, which many developers have admitted they struggled with during the early days of the console to get the best out of Sony’s clearly powerful hardware: “that isn’t the first thing developers think when they first come to PS3.
“However, on the PS3 tools, that is the direction we went, and we added support for all the intricate hardware,” Beveridge told Develop. “The fancier it was, the more diagnostics we could show developers, and the more they could interact with. That can be different from what some developers coming to a platform would expect.”
This time around, though, the goal was “making [Vita] development as easy as possible”, resulting in a redesign of the dev tools “based on the feedback we had from the last five years of PS3.”
Hopefully this new focus will mean that PlayStation Vita developers will be able to make Sony’s powerful new handheld shine right from launch.
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